Richard Brodsky: Get ready for chaos to break out

RICHARD BRODSKY

Published 7:05 pm, Monday, May 26, 2014

There wasn't a spontaneous moment at either the Democratic or Republican conventions. The fixers and spinners were in tight control, the scripts were followed. Not to worry. Chaos is about to break out.

If the Republican Party remains the party of guns, extreme social conservatism and tax cuts for the rich, it will hover at its current level of support of 28 percent and could finish third. Rob Astorino has virtues as a candidate;, he's photogenic and well-spoken. But there's almost no evidence about what he truly believes. And there's even less evidence of whether he can, or wants to, pivot on crucial issues and broaden his appeal beyond the roughly one-fourth of New York's voters who are hard right and already in his camp.

If Democrat Andrew Cuomo is rejected by the Working Families Party, a similar kind of meltdown could develop. Polls show Cuomo losing more than 20 percent of the statewide electorate to a credible ideological challenger from the Left.

Cuomo certainly knows how to pivot. But is he willing to do so on the key economic agenda that has defined his first term? Will he run as the Democrat who repealed the bank tax, cut the estate tax, imposed tax and spending caps and became, in education activist Billy Easton's piquant phrase, Governor 1 Percent? What happened to income inequality and the new progressive economics of Bill de Blasio?

Pay no attention to the various sideshows. There will be hoo-hahs about spunky Kathy Hochul's position on undocumented New Yorkers and the DREAM Act (she will adjust), and about whether Republican attorney general candidate John Cahill will get covert support from the Cuomo camp (he will), and whether a real campaign finance bill will suddenly move the Working Families Party rank and file into the Cuomo camp (it won't). Interesting, but not at the heart of the politics of 2014.

Astorino has reinvented the Republican Party of Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javits as a smiling version of the tea party. Cuomo has reinvented the Democratic Party as a vehicle for cutting-edge progressive politics on social issues, and tea party economics.

Note the differences. On social and identity issues New Yorkers will get a stark choice. Ban abortion? Expand gun rights? Strip protections from gay New Yorkers? Discourage immigration reform? Vote for Astorino, not Cuomo.

Note the similarities. Want to reduce bank taxes, corporate taxes, estate taxes and the overall burden on the rich? Vote for either man.

Bill Clinton understood that the first argument in an election is about "the economy, stupid." So do Astorino and Cuomo. The problem for New Yorkers is that they both support the same remedies — austerity, tax cuts and corporate subsidies.

Comes now the Working Families Party. Its core message, its very name, is a plea for economic policies that favor middle-class and working poor families.

It's been a political success, until it was unable to stop the Cuomo shift to the economic right. It's convention next week will be a convulsive identity crisis.

Will a combination of gay marriage, the SAFE Act and a new campaign finance bill be enough for the WFP to abandon it's historic economic mission?

Bill Clinton was right: it is about the economy. The political chaos comes if the WFP stands by its economic guns. A real gubernatorial campaign about economic ideas, about income inequality, about the failure of austerity economics, about job creation, about why high tax areas (suburbs and New York City) have booming economies and low tax areas (upstate) don't will only happen if and when the WFP forces the debate. And if the debate catches on, then you could see the WFP surpass Astorino. That's chaos.